Why DevOps
DevOps is the future. And increasingly it is not optional but mandatory for businesses to be more responsive in the marketplace.
DevOps - Why It Matters
Ultimately every business and public-sector organisation is aiming to provide the absolute best services. And features that they can deliver to their customers and citizens as quickly as possible. In spite of there not being a silver bullet to improve IT efficiency, DevOps has yielded results that are hard to ignore
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps allows businesses to respond more quickly to changing customer needs and produce more reliable products with higher availability and scalability while lowering long-term costs regardless of the industry they operate in.
Faster delivery time
Collaborative culture, automation, continuous delivery and fast feedback cycles are the cornerstone of DevOps principles allow of which make software development faster and more efficient. Being an evolutionary stretch to the Agile methodology, DevOps enhance technical practices to ensure a smooth flow through the Software Development Lifecycle.
Innovating culture and mindset
By streamlining processes and having efficient releases of higher quality, teams and team members are more relaxed and engaged to bring new more innovative approaches to resolve issues and optimise the software delivery process. Studies indicate that employees in teams that leverage DevOps practices are happier and more fulfilled in their roles.
Improved customer experience
By leveraging DevOps Organisations can significantly improve their deployment frequency, recovery times and lower change failure rates. With the use of automated delivery pipelines, it is possible for Organisations to validate the reliability and stability of every release of the system and deliver a far better customer experience.
Reduced Costs
Having all teams and team members actively involved in the software delivery process from beginning to end not only leads to more efficient releases of higher quality but also reduces the amount of technical debt created and reduces the amount of rework required, reducing software delivery costs long-term
Decreased risk
DevOps fosters a culture of knowledge sharing between teams and team members. Therefore reducing the dependency on specific individuals. In addition DevOps combines the automated, continuous testing and monitoring of the system. As a result it ensures that defects are detected and resolved early. Furthermore risk is reduced by DevOps with the ethos of releasing code early and often. In other words, having smaller more frequent releases that are more manageable.
High collaboration between teams
Without out a doubt effective collaboration and communication is critical. Especially in today’s dynamic, always-on environment. DevOps paves the way by fostering a culture of mutual collaboration and communication through shared ownership across globally distributed teams. All teams and team members involved in the software delivery process are responsible for building and running the system. Consequently, breaking down silos that existed between teams involved in the software development process i.e. Development, Infrastructure, Security, DBA teams.
DevOps allows businesses to create and improve products at a faster rate than they could with traditional software development approaches. As well as reducing the associated risks and costs
DevOps compared to traditional approaches
Generally, in traditional approaches to software delivery, development teams (Application teams) and operational teams (Infrastructure, Security, DBA teams) work in silos. So Development teams would focus on delivering changes, deploying features, fixes and enhancements (improvements). And in contrast operational teams focus on making sure that the system is available, maintainable, recoverable and scalable.
In other words, development teams think about the functional aspects of the system and operational teams think about the non-functional aspects of the system. As a result development teams would build the system and hand it over to the operations teams to run and maintain in Production.
DevOps is or at least originated as the effort to bring development and operational teams together. And use a unified approach to building and running the system as a whole. In addition both teams have a shared responsibility for the functional and non-functional aspects of the system.
Because of this there is no distinction between development and operational teams in DevOps. Conversely, everyone involved in the software development process is part of the same team. And the team is responsible for building and running the system through its lifecycle.
So How Does DevOps Compare To Agile?
Both Agile and DevOps began as ways to improve software development. Although each had a different perspective.
Agile tackles the problem of building software overall by embracing changing requirements and prioritising working software over rigid processes. And allowing teams to build software faster. Furthermore, Agile covers more of the project or product management side of delivering software. For instance it introduces strongly defined roles such as the Product Owner and or Scrum Master.
Conversely, DevOps focuses on getting code into production and improving the process. For example having all of the technical teams involved in the software development process work together. In addition to this DevOps provides teams with a formula to deploy code more often and increase quality and security, requiring engineers to accept shared responsibility for building and running systems.
In short DevOps builds on the project or product management practices that Agile provides. And focuses on the technical practices to build, deploy and run code in Production.
To Sum Up
As the demand for Cloud services increases, so too will the demand for DevOps. In fact, before long DevOps will be essential for all businesses. Including those operating in the energy, healthcare, legal or education sectors. With this in mind, understanding what DevOps is, how it’s implemented, and why it’s so important, represents an essential first step.